Farrow - A Memoir

I was nine when my childhood ended. We had celebrated my birthday the day before, which was a Saturday, and it hadnt gone well. Healthy, noisy kids were all over my backyard, and I had a feeling that had become familiar to me during those last weeks: that I was watching everything from a great distance. My mother had taken me to a number of doctors, but they could find no reason for the fatigue or the insomnia that now plagued me.

So on this day of my ninth birthday party I was used to being tired. That it hurt to move wasnt unusual either, and I was sitting on a low wall watching my friends playing ball down the driveway. When the ball smacked the bricks under my feet, everybody yelled, Come on kick it back, hurry up, and even though I clearly remember thinking, Dont, I pushed myself off the wall and a surprise pain, a bad one, shot through my legs, back, and neck as I dropped straight down onto the pavement. As my friends crowded around, I tried to laugh. I was mortified. It was my birthday and I couldnt even get up. Then Eileen, our Irish cook, and Barbara or Lucille, I forget which nanny, carried me to bed, where I lay flat and quiet, listening to the party outside my window.

The next morning was Sunday, and missing Mass was a mortal sin in the fifties, but again I fell to the floor. Everything hurt. It was a bad sign when Dr. Shirley, our pediatrician, came into the nursery and didnt even smile. His daughter Becky went to school with me every day on the bus, but now he was showing me a big long needle, saying he was going to put it into my spine so he could get fluid and find out whats wrong with me, its called a spinal tap. I never knew there was fluid in my spine. I felt like throwing up.

I had to curl into a ball so he could get inside my actual spine. My mother said she had to do something like this too, every time she went to have a babythats seven times. But I was nine, and I didnt want babies. I didnt want any of this. I considered Dr. Shirley among the most handsome of my parents friends, so it was embarrassing being curled up in front of him with a needle in my spine. I didnt even like him seeing me in my undershirt, and I certainly didnt like to hear him breathing so loud and close. I shut my eyes tight; he was taking forever and it really hurt. I went through the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, all my times tables, and the planets, starting with Mercury. But the main thing I kept thinking was, I just hope I dont die.

Then Dr. Shirley took my fluid away and we had to wait. In the next room I could hear the drone of the Rosary. Beside my bed was a pretty miniature wooden chest with flowers and birds painted all over it. I kept my best stuff in the drawers: my First Communion prayer book with the pearl cover, some dolls eyes, a piece of blue eggshell, almost all the parts from my first watch including the changeable colored bands that you could wear as bracelets, a parrot feather from Mexico, a real silver bullet, my dead turtles dried-up shell, a pen-and-pencil set that was too good to use, the thumbtack my brother Johnny had stuck in my foot when I was asleep, three Irish coins, a painted fan, a desiccated beetle, our collie Billys tooth. I cant remember everything, but I picked out what I thought each of my brothers and sisters would want, dividing everything fair and square into six neat piles, eldest at the leftThen an ambulances siren drowned out the prayers of my family.

Dr. Shirley walked in, not looking me in the eye, picked me up, and carried me out of the bedroom past my mother, who was cheerfully saying how she got to ride in ambulances whenever she had to go to the hospital to have babies. I heard him tell her, Better burn all that, referring to the six piles, each with a note. There were no good-byes. Perhaps my brothers and sisters waved from the window, but I didnt look back.

My father, my mother, and I were headed to the public wards for contagious diseases at Los Angeles General Hospital. Inside the ambulance I squeezed my mothers hand while, through a rear window, tall, drab buildings skimmed past. I had never seen downtown Los Angeles before. It was nothing at all like Beverly Hills.